


Coming Clean

by hxcpanda (inkforhumanhands)



Category: Green Day
Genre: Childhood, Coming Out, Ficlet, Gen, POV Billie Joe, Secrets, Sleepovers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-02-25
Updated: 2010-02-25
Packaged: 2021-03-16 05:13:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 752
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29695554
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkforhumanhands/pseuds/hxcpanda
Summary: At a middle school sleepover with Mike, Billie Joe wrestles with whether he should come out to his friend.
Relationships: Billie Joe Armstrong & Mike Dirnt
Kudos: 2





	Coming Clean

**Author's Note:**

> Found this in my personal archives, written about 10-11 years ago.

There it was again, the burning sensation behind his nose and the fluttery, anxious feeling in his chest. It had followed him, off and on, a sporadic stalker for the past few months. It peered out from behind a lampshade as he and his friends slumped on the basement couch, talking about girls. It clouded the water running from the showerhead, stared back at him from the crack running through his bedroom ceiling. His hand clenched reflexively underneath his pillow, looking for a gun to scare it off. 

One day he woke up and it was sitting on his chest. He tried to squirm out from under it, but it pinned him down. So he screamed, or made the attempt, but found it was in his breath, too. What would he do with _those_ type of lungs? He shuddered at the thought and pushed it away, but it got a little closer that morning.

From then on, whenever his hands shook, they shook with it. If his mouth was dry, it had taken the moisture. When the color drained from his face, it was the ghost. It dogged him.

Sometimes he’d put on the lens-less pair of glasses he kept in a drawer, and examine himself from far away, like he was another person, or a doctor. He’d always purse his lips and frown the way his real physician did while checking his heartbeat with the cold stethoscope. He wasn’t surprised, only disappointed, to find two. Lately, he felt like he was turning into someone else.

He had already been through all the changes, hair sprouting in new places and a voice now devoid of its former shrillness. He had grown unexpectedly into a man while he hadn’t been paying attention, and it suited him. His complacency was his downfall. It was only too easy to uproot him, throw off his balance, and shove him in a direction in which he wasn’t comfortable to step down. Now he was flailing, the sole of his shoe crashing ever closer to the ground…

He took air, deep down into his diaphragm, and propelled it back out, pressing it into a melody on its way. The muggy air trapped in the garage along with them was giving him a second skin, one of sweat. If he sang hard enough, if he forced the microphone to take on his anguish, his confusion, maybe he’d be able to shed it like a snake. He certainly felt reptilian, struggling to stay the right temperature all the time. 

It was exhausting, and his eyelids drooped heavily. He was in his bed now, surrounded by a pressing silence, one that left him alone with it. He berated it, till its confidence was low, but then it snuck up on him just before sleep claimed his weary mind. It liked to do that; it was an admirer of Pearl Harbor. 

It hit him other times, and smoldered in his belly as he shared secrets with his best friend, but not this one. To be a secret, it had to be real. He wouldn’t yield that ground, not yet. His flashlight’s bulb flickered out, and he suggested they call their vigil quits for the night. His friend sighed into his sleeping bag, sensing something had gone unsaid. He rolled over, patient.

And then something happened. The light clicked back on. Apprehension thickened the atmosphere, pulsating between atoms and creating static between the two boys. 

“What?”

“Never mind.”

It was dark again. The shame of it all was too much. He was in freefall, merely listening for the smack of his own body against the chasm floor. The crushing solitude of his silence leered at him from all over, and he had dueling fears to contend with. His eyes, adjusted to the low light from the VCR clock, made out the cocooned shape of his friend a few feet away. He gripped the flashlight tightly.

One more try. 

“What?” his friend blinked, shielding his face from the brightness with his hand. 

“Hey Mike, what if…?”

Pointing the flashlight away, he sent a beam toward the opposite wall. He gulped, and reached inside himself to the part that maybe wasn’t there, that couldn’t be there but was—the part that tormented him with its inadequacy and the error of all he was made to be. He reached inside himself to that part and acknowledged it, stood with it as an equal, and let it in on his pain. 

He turned the light on himself.


End file.
